1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to controlling the reproduction of media information, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for reproducing multimedia on the basis of SMIL.
2. Background of the Related Art
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is a language which is used to temporally and spatially reproduce in terms of position, time, and/or other parameters extensible markup language (XML)-based multimedia, including text, images (e.g., bmp, jpg, png, gif), audio (e.g., wav, mp3) and/or video (e.g., mpeg). By connecting objects of multimedia data through a uniform resource locator (URL), SMIL not only provides a media stream but also a diverse number of services. For example, it may be used to transmit more information to users by dynamically providing diverse mediums together with an image. SMIL, pronounced “smile,” has been developed by a group under World Wide WEB Consortium (W3C).
From a functional standpoint, SMIL is similar to Number Translation Markup Language (NTML) except that every tag is written in lower case and is XML-based. Using SMIL, Web site creators can easily define and synchronize expressions on the Web or multimedia factors for interaction such as video, sound or still images. In addition, mobile images, still images or sound on the Web can be transferred to users. Those factors, however, cannot interact with each other without elaborate programming.
SMIL helps to control reproduction time even though Web site creators separately send several pieces of movies, still images and sound. Objects of each media are accessed by a specific URL, which means that presentations can be made by objects reaching one or more URLs and the objects can easily be re-used in several presentations.
Accordingly, in the situation where XML has been established as a standard language for the next-generation Internet including the Web service, XML-based SMIL and its related techniques are expected to be used as a core technology to freely implement multimedia contents. A module defined with SMIL can also be used for existing HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) by an XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) or a Markup language for a mobile Internet.
Hardware such as a general personal computer (PC) or a pocket PC having a digital signal processor (DSP) (or Central Processor Unit (CPU)) can independently process each media contained in an SMIL document. The hardware can individually process and output each media using a thread. However, there are drawbacks. Significantly, reproduction of a plurality of media in a limited resource system in which multi-process is not supported requires a multimedia control method or algorithm, which should be implemented after fully considering problems such as a processor burden or a reproduction performance degradation of the SMIL multimedia. These drawbacks make reproduction inefficient and therefore improvement is needed.